Hey Rook!

Last time out I was surprised to discover I had never covered the 1973 set Topps issued to commemorate The Rookies. Originally an ABC-TV Movie of the Week that aired in March of 1972, the flick and the series that followed that fall focused on the work and personal lives of a small group of Los Angeles police officers that had recently graduated from the police academy.  The most famous member of the cast turned out to be Kate Jackson, who played a nurse married to one of the fledgling cops. Ratings were middling until the third season when it crept into the Top 25 and a syndication deal was reached. That fell apart and after one more season the show was done.

The middling ratings may explain why this set is so hard to track down these days.  It's clearly a 1973 issue based upon the test T-code assigned by Topps and in fact it's only the second one to use their new nomenclature for test sets (the first was Emergency!/Adam-12, which also kicked off a rather generic refinement of many non-sports sets to follow). A test wrapper is known:

As mentioned in my post last week, only 60 cards have been graded by PSA.  I can't say I've seen any with gum stains but that wrapper does look like it had been folded with cards inside. I have to assume the test failed miserably. With many examples known in the hobby being severely miscut, I wonder if a sheet, or a partial, was cut up after the fact somehow?  

Happily, my type example is cut well; it's not perfect but for this set it's close:

The backs, also standardized, feature some text and partial puzzle piece action:

That's Georg Sanford Brown pictured, whose missing "e" I found fascinating as a kid. 

As I've written, the cards are extremely tough to find and only one full set is shown in the PSA Registry. In theory, it's easier than Emergency!/Adam-12, which has a mere 46 graded PSA examples, with 50 cards needed for a set, but that's splitting hairs.  In fact, I've seen more raw E!/12 cards than examples from The Rookies over the years , although not by much. Not all of the most difficult Topps test cards are from the Sixties!

Brown & Blue

While I didn't bid on it, a curious piece of Topps history was hammered on eBay late last year.  Using their own employees for photo shoots was a continuing theme with Topps in the Sixties and Seventies, and some of their antics are a little humorous in retrospect.

This is an original photographic pasteup from the archives of Brown Brothers, a stock photo firm that was big for a good chunk of the Twentieth Century: 

Lelands has been auctioning off the firm's archival items on the 'Bay and also in some catalog auctions but the three notations are masking another Brown reference, namely the friendly "shopkeeper" pounding a baseball mitt, one Len Brown.  Brown was Topps New Product Director Woody Gelman's assistant at the time and he's helping the PR push for those 1963 Bazooka boxes that not only had three package design baseball cards on the revere but five All Time Greats cards within. 

These were the boxes being hawked by Len:

The reverse of the photo shows a lot of decrepit rubber cement along with a notation:

I've blown it up to make it easier to read:

I am surmising this particular piece came from Len's first wife and was in her possession as part of their divorce.  Of note are mention of three 1973-74 test issues; in order these are Deckle Baseball cards from '74, plus The Waltons and The Rookies, both TV shows of the day that Topps tried to make work as card sets in 1973.  I've covered the first two here previously but to my surprise I've never referenced The Rookies, which is one of the tougher test issues of the decade and far harder to track down than the other two, at least from what I've found.

They come from a time when Topps was trying to standardize some of their graphics:

A little text and a puzzle make up the reverse:

The example above is unusual as it's not severely miscut, since most of the set's surviving examples are found that way. In fact, many of its 44 subjects are horizontally-oriented and the cuts can be so bad that the caption is often found above the photo and not below:

Yikes!  It's truly a tough issue and finding well-cut cards is super challenging.   PSA has graded a mere 60 examples overall with nothing above a grade of 7 given. However, 44 of them are in the sole registry set, which is complete with a GPA of 6.898. By way of reference, 255 Waltons cards have been PSA slabbed (nine 9's given) and over 3,000 1974 Deckles, with seventy-six 10's granted somehow!

Second Team

I'm on a bit of a Baseball Candy roll of late and today we look at what is the least popular of the five subsets that made up Topps' inaugural release of a standalone baseball set. That would be the Team cards.

I've written about these oblong,  gold bordered cards previously but there was a recent sale of a full master set of 18 at Heritage that caught my eye, although not my wallet.  Sets do come up, a bit infrequently, but every year or so one is offered at auction. It's unusual for the master set of dated and undated varieties to pop up but that too, happens from time to time.

Printed along with the Connie Mack All Star cards, PSA as of December 13th, had graded 1,053 examples of which the highest is a lone 8.5 of the dated Athletics card.  The dimensions work against them as a mere six straight 8's have been assigned and it's easy to infer high grade raw examples are just not out there. Meanwhile 996 Connie Mack's have been slabbed by PSA and 211 Major League All Stars. That's a different distribution from the last time I really checked, about a decade ago, with the spread between Teams and the Connie Mack's almost pulling even while the Major League All Stars have gone from about half the population of the Connie's to a mere twenty percent or so. Those MLAS cards are tough kids!

Distribution between the dated and undated Teams varieties seems roughly even and the least graded cards are those of the Giants, followed by the White Sox and Cardinals. I'm still tying to figure out if Topps used three different cardboard stocks and can say the recent Heritage lot only showed two, the brilliant white stock that seems to stay bright forever and the far dingier tan backs. I've long thought a cream stock exists but it didn't show up in this lot and relying upon scans doesn't always yield precise results. Let's take a look then at two different Teams, the Dodgers and Athletics.

The boys from Brooklyn were going to blow a massive lead in the National League pennant race by season's end but it was a dynastic squad that often brawled with an even more dynastic one in the Yankees from 1947-56, with six World Series clashes but only a single World Championship to show for it.

The back of this undated card shows off the brilliant white stock; it's a thing of beauty in a way:

Meanwhile the Whiz Kids got a National League Champions notation:

There was no Yankees card as seven teams were never produced, so no corresponding American League Champions card exists. The back of the Phillies card is also brilliant white:

They got two red pennants added on the back as well.

Now for the dated cards, which were issued after the undated ones, likely in a bid to avoid running afoul of Bowman.  Dodgers again:

Here's a closeup of the name plate showing the date.

The dingier card stock is easily discernable when compared to the white:

The Phillies stand tall...

...despite the dingier card stock:

That's how the whole auction lot presented; brilliant white for the undated cards, dingy stock for the ones with dates.

The offered set was ninth on the PSA Registry and a check over there shows sixteen master sets on the registry, with half of them at 100% completion. The Heritage lot was the lowest ranked set that was complete, with a GPA of 3.48; the no. 1 set has a GPA of  6.16 and only one other partial is above 6. 

These cards are not for everybody but many Hall of Fame players can be found in the photos and they certainly have their place in the history of the hobby.